Art museums are fraught. Cold, quiet, sedentary, and traditionally in areas with money to spare, they can feel unwelcoming to visitors who left their art degree at home. For decades, artists have pushed back against the confines of the museum institution in a multitude of ways--giant land sculptures, ephemeral performance art, creating art disguised as restaurants or bookstores. These alternatives are all ways to say “We want art, but we want it in our own space.”

Proyectos Impala, owned and operated by Alejandro Morales, falls right in line in a genuinely impactful way. The mobile contemporary art museum lives in a converted trailer, and the mobility of the museum helps to both expand the audience and match exhibitions with appropriate venues. Based in Juárez, a city not known for its plentiful contemporary art museums, Proyectos Impala fills a cultural gap.

Everything about the museum is Juárez-specific; the semi-trailer cab, typically used to transport materials and finished goods across the border, is a familiar site for city residents. Two Juárez-based businesses--Transportes SVM and Los Tristes--take care of the museum’s transportation and storage. The venues, neighborhoods, and audiences that house and visit the museum, are clearly specific to Juárez. However, the art inside is not, which makes Ciudad Juárez Projects an unusual, richly integrated collaboration between foreign artist and local resident.

The Proyectos Impala website describes the all-too-common cycle of foreign artists who visit Juárez and badly (in my opinion) collaborate with young, local artists to create sensationalist work that centers around “the war against drug trafficking or feminicides.” This work is then shipped away, like so many other foreign goods produced in Mexico, and are never seen in final form by the residents who helped create and shape the work.

Not so with Ciudad Juárez Projects. By exhibiting with Proyecto Impala, the work can be “reintegrated into the life of the city where it is presented for evaluation, discussion, appreciation and criticism of the same people who make up the theme of the work.”

So in a sense, when one walks into the ASU Art Museum and sees a hallway lined with text, photos, and an informational video about Proyectos Impala--well before Francis Alÿs’s work is even visible--this process and method of working is the artwork primarily on display. Before the finished product, we see the photos of visitors, the trailer blueprints, the books that were on display when Proyectos Impala showed Ciudad Juárez Projects.

We also see relics of Alÿs’s process throughout the exhibition. Objects hang on the walls, untethered from explanations, confusing until retrospectively identified. A shard of mirror hangs from a hook, unimportant and intriguing, until it shows up, larger-than-life, in the video hugging the left wall.

On the other side of the Proyectos Impala hallway, a long display case stretches along the floor, preserving Alÿs’s artistic planning space in metaphorical amber. The case feels like it serves a few different purposes; to show the care and work that went into the videos, to explain some of the more subtle themes, to make it clear that both of these videos were complex endeavors. At the same time, to the casual visitor, none of these reasons are compelling enough to steal attention from the huge videos that command the senses.

The notes are colorful and scrawled and difficult to read, and there’s a whimsy in that. But especially when butted against the Proyectos Impala hallway, which is strictly informative and pushes to evoke the experience of the trailer as much as possible, Alÿs’s darkened video room renders these extra papers mostly unnecessary.

The videos are clear, powerful, thoughtful. We know he did the work. He doesn’t need to prove it with haphazard notebook pages.

Both videos--Children’s Game #15, 2013 and Paradox of Praxis #5, 2013--seem to get at the nature of being human. In both videos, the characters are playing at something else--living outside their realities for a minute. They play off of each other unexpectedly and disorientingly; while boys run wildly in Children’s Game, you hear a train rush by in the background. While watching Praxis, pounding footsteps play behind you, sharply contrasting with the onscreen character’s slow, deliberate steps.

The young boys in Children’s Game are all youth and joy, playing at war. The camera is jumpy, and in this way, we as viewers are not quietly observing from afar; instead, we’re immersed. Armed with shards of mirror, the boys innocently catch light and beam it onto their friends in a long-distance version of tag, or a metaphysical paintball game. The boys run across a desolate landscape, playing in unfinished, empty homes. They run through empty doorways, hide under open window holes.

It’s lighthearted, but real-world violence clearly echoes. Most striking is the machine-gun noise they make. Like a lyre bird that’s learned to mimic the sound of a camera shutter, the machine-gun click of their tongue echoes their probable environment in a way a cartoonish “Bang!” never would.

In the meantime, the man kicking the soccer ball also escapes his reality in a sense, plunging himself into a fantastical, uncanny daydream. While the warrior boys are playing at some semblance of adulthood, the man in Praxis is aiming for something more juvenile--though still looped with threads of danger. He’s literally playing with fire, as the kids in the other video play around the edges of a different kind of fire.

Praxis opens with a poignant phrase: “Sometimes we dream as we live; sometimes we live as we dream.” As he slowly kicks the ball, he passes through a darkened world. Wide shots ground him in reality; he kicks the ball past a nightclub blasting muffled music, he waits for a train to pass, he passes two unsmiling boys. In this way, he’s not a safe, untouchable metaphor--he’s the beacon of different, of unusual. He’s doing something markedly strange in an ordinary landscape, which is not so different from actively pursuing a dream.

In the final part of his walk through brush grass, the ball is quickly falling apart. The soccer ball temporarily lights parts of the grass on fire, but it quickly burns out. Our hero disappears into the distance, the fragmenting ball kicking off parts of itself with every blow, like a last-ditch effort to touch something, to ignite something. Like a dream that’s trying very hard not to die. Unlike the kids, whose play ends in fake deaths for everyone.

Exiting through the Proyectos Impala hallway feels grounding, and like an important reminder that collaborations like this can only be made possible under the best and most generous of circumstances. Like the fiery soccer ball, this movable museum expands horizons and brings contemporary art to wider audiences, all with the aim to ignite.